Beware of These Five Red Flags in Used-Car Listings
How to read between the pixels, and sort the good from the bad when searching for a used car.
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As a professional wholesale car buyer for more than 20 years, I scour thousands of car listings every year. In that time, I’ve learned to sort the wheat from the chaff with snap judgments based on one key lesson: buying a quality used car is as much about the seller as it is the car. Want to find a great car, truck, or SUV without wasting your time? Focus on the quality sellers who offer internet listings that eliminate uncertainty and provide full disclosure.
Ultimately, you’ll want to see a car in person, test drive it, get a vehicle history report, and arrange a pre-purchase inspection by a trustworthy mechanic before deciding whether or not to buy the used vehicle you have your eye on. Before you get to that point, you can use the following profiles to narrow your search to the most promising vehicles. These are the most common red flags that lead me to cross a seller and their vehicle off my list, and indicators that a used car is worthy of my time and attention.
Watch Out for These Red Flags
Captain Caps!“WOW LOOK AT THIS ONE!!! THIS IS A GREAT LOOKING SEDAN AT A GREAT PRICE!!!” Captain Caps is almost always a seller who thinks that using big capital letters will yield big capital results when it comes to selling a car for MORE MONEY!!! These sellers are often trying to find customers who have bad credit and will pay more than the market price as long as they can get financing. If that doesn’t describe you, Captain Caps will probably not have the car you want.
Sir Spam-A-Lot
If you started out searching for a Honda Civic compact sedan and found yourself browsing a listing for a pickup truck the size of Texas, you may have been hooked by Sir Spam-A-Lot. This seller has several tricks up his sleeve to gain more attention on his posting. The most common one is typing the name of every single vehicle ever made at the end of his listing in the hope of getting more clicks. It may have worked on you in the past, but now you know to keep your guard up when you come across these ads.
This seller may have a playbook full of deceptive tricks, such as posing as an owner when he’s actually a dealer, or posting a car for sale without key information. Want to know what the real price for this $1 car is, or how many miles are on it? You’ll have to get in touch. Sir Spam-A-Lot will use any hook to get you to his door, except the simple act of being honest with you.
The Cover Girl
What’s underneath those seat covers? It could be leather. It could be gummy bears. Or it could be more rips, gouges, and tears than a horror movie marathon. The Cover Girl never wants to show you everything. Sometimes she only has pictures of the outside of a vehicle. Other times there might be no rear end photos, or no rear seat images. Sometimes there are no pictures at all.
You can contact the seller and ask for the missing pieces of the puzzle, but from my personal experience, this effort rarely gets you the complete picture you need to make an informed decision. That’s because the Cover Girl is hoping to find a buyer who will make an uninformed decision.
The Lazy Daisy
Some cars sit so long they not only have dirt all over them, they have plants growing out from between the wheel spokes and bird’s nests in their bonnets. The good thing about a Lazy Daisy is that, if they’re hiding something, they’re not trying too hard to hide it. The car may be filthy and have flat tires in photos. Or it may be freshened up on one side, only to have the remaining parts of the car covered with dirt from years of sitting.
Just know that with these sellers, what you see is what you get. It’s likely that the neglect goes beyond car washes. Maintenance, recalls, and repairs may have been missed, too. If you look at a vehicle history report and notice that the car hasn’t been registered for several years, you also have yourself a Lazy Daisy.
Mr. Clean
Mr. Clean wants you to buy with your eyes. The wheels will sometimes be covered in shiny tire cleaner goop that you never see in the real world. You could be tempted to eat off the engine — as long as you don’t mind the taste of detailing goop. But Mr. Clean’s car may not be any better cared for than Lazy Daisy’s car. He just understands that a polished shine will allow him to charge more and find a buyer quicker.
Detailing the engine doesn’t do anything other than hide oil leaks, and in some cases, damage electronic sensors. So if you see an engine that looks spotless on an older car, be very concerned. As for the interior? You may be disappointed if you look beyond the shined-up metal. Areas that are hard to clean, like the passenger floor or juice-stained rear seats can tell you a lot more about that car’s hidden history. Using the VIN number to look up the vehicle history helps as well.
Signs You’re Dealing with a Trustworthy Used-Car Seller
Honest Abe
Honest Abe doesn’t want to waste anyone’s time — ever. If he’s selling a manual transmission and you can only drive an automatic, you’ll never click the ad, because Honest Abe has that information in the headline. After all, why waste a stranger’s time?
Honest Abe’s listings will usually feature more than a dozen pictures showing everything including the unflattering details. His close-ups show that his 20-year-old car isn’t in “MINT CONDITION!!!” as Captain Caps would say. Because after all, what 20-year-old car is perfect?
The Chronicler
Well, if anyone is going to have a perfect two-decade-old car, it’s the Chronicler. This seller provides a detailed list of every single thing done to the car. This does not always mean the car is flawless, though. Far from it, in some cases. But it says something about the character of a person when the seller discloses past or current damage that many buyers wouldn’t notice.
Often the Chronicler will own a modified car driven “all the way to redline where you can feel a slight mechanical fizz.” Was that fizz a smooth crescendo? Or a cacophonous cry for help from a tired old engine? The Chronicler tends to be more trustworthy than your average used-car seller, but it’s still a smart idea to get a mechanic to take a close look before you buy.
The Dealer’s Best Friend
I love drivers who follow the owner's manual recommendations consistently and prioritize maintenance at their local service department. I call them the Dealer’s Best Friend. These are one-owner cars with a glovebox (or even a real box) loaded with all the records of every single maintenance performed. In the used-car market, these vehicles are definitely worth your time.
They’re not always easy to find. If you’re looking at a dealer’s inventory, these kinds of details often get lost in boilerplate ad copy. Privacy concerns also encourage the dealer to remove the past owner’s records from the car. A Carfax history, however, can often uncover the faithful maintenance habits of the Dealer’s Best Friend.
The Enthusiast
Along with cars owned by the Dealer’s Best Friend, this is the other type of car I enjoy looking at even before I pull up to the curb and kick the tires. Enthusiasts tend to take their cars to specialists, who are particularly savvy at taking care of little problems before they become big. Since they see the same brand of vehicles day in and day out, these mechanics also tend to use higher quality wear items (such as oil filters, air filters, and brakes) than shops that serve all makes, which often rely on discount auto parts stores.
One other big plus when dealing with enthusiasts: If you happen to be passionate about that particular vehicle, the seller is often happy to tell you more about the car’s maintenance history and what to expect for future maintenance and common repairs. The same is often true for the shops that serve enthusiasts.
Written by humans.
Edited by humans.
Steven LangSteven Lang is a special contributor to Capital One with nearly two decades of experience as an auto auctioneer, car dealer, and part owner of an auto auction. Some of the best-known auto publications turn to him for his expert insight. He is also the co-developer of the Long-Term Quality Index, a survey of vehicle reliability featuring over two million vehicles that have been inspected by professional mechanics.
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